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When optimization gets practical

Customer stories, technical guides, and deep dives into 3D content optimization pipelines.

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Open world

Customer story: Scaling Forza Horizon 6 with Simplygon

Forza Horizon 6 welcomes players to Japan: a location of striking contrasts, where rural landscapes, mountain roads, wooded regions, industrial districts, and the iconic streets of Tokyo City come together in one spectacular driving experience. Simplygon became an important enabling technology in achieving that goal, supporting Playground Gamesʼ technical art and content teams across three key areas: Hierarchical Level of Detail, Projection Level of Detail, and Impostor Baking.

Unreal Engine

Control LOD switch distances in Simplygon's Unreal Engine plugin

In this blog, we'll explore how to control LOD switch distances in Unreal Engine when using Simplygon's LOD Recipes. We'll look at both automatically calculated switch distances and how to override these with manual switch distances when needed.

Characters

Create vertex weights from skinning data

In this blog we will have a look at how to generate vertex weights from skinning data. This lets us use bones to control geometric density. In our case we will use it to make character faces more detailed than their bodies after reduction.

Best practices

How to optimize vegetation with Simplygon

In this blog, we will look at five different tools for automated vegetation asset optimization. We will go in order from those suitable for closer distances to those to be used when the vegetation is further away.

Blender

Introduction to Part Remover tool

In this blog post, we will look at how to use the part remover in Simplygon to remove small disconnected parts from a 3D model. We will also look at how to combine part removal with reduction to get better results when reducing models that consist of several disconnected parts.

3ds Max

LOD0 character optimization using quad reduction and material baking

In this blog post, we will create a character optimization pipeline inside 3ds Max. It will feature quad reduction and material merging. With vertex weighting, geometric quality and UV scaling can be controlled by the artist painting vertex colors.

Best practices

What is the right reduction target for LOD creation?

A common question when generating LODs is which reduction target to use. Using a poor target is the root of many problems, such as LOD popping or broken assets. In this blog we’ll go through the different reduction targets available in Simplygon and give you some guidelines on where to start.

Batching

Load additional texture channels into a Simplygon scene

In this blog post, we will showcase how to load textures into additional material channels in a file. This is useful if you are using material channels not defined in a standard file format (like FBX).

Batching

Handling alpha clipping with compute casters

In this blog we will have a look at how to create billboard impostors for assets using shaders with alpha clipping. The solution is to introduce a little code snippet using sg_DiscardValue and sg_PreviousValue in every sampler function.

Characters

How animation hides LOD Transitions

In this blog post, we will investigate how animations affect LOD transitions. According to our results from our small sample set, we can switch around 2-4 times closer to the camera if an object is animated compared to when it is static.

Meshlets

Introduction to Clustered Meshlet Optimization

In this blog post we will look at Simplygon's new clustered meshlet feature. We will cover how to generated them and a way to visualize them which serves as the base for implementing a clustered meshlet rendering pipeline in your engine.

Impostor

How to find correct settings for Billboard Cloud: Outer shell

Billboard clouds can be a lifesaver for assets where neither reduction or remeshing works. In this blog we will cover how to find good optimization settings for a Billboard Cloud: Outer Shell impostor.